The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch by Graham Sharpe 256pp, Aurum, £16.99

In the first result of the most recent election, Sunderland South, the Official Monster Raving Loony party, represented by Mad Cow Girl Warner, won 0.5% of the votes. Warner thus got no nearer than the party's founder, David "Screaming Lord" Sutch, to realising his supreme dream: receiving no votes whatever. Nevertheless, she triumphantly succeeded in maintaining the party's fine tradition of making an absolute mockery of the proceedings, spoiling the perfect picture of democracy at its noblest moment: the people's will expressed, policies endorsed, selfless aspiration rewarded with the political crown. Sutch himself had provided the supreme instance of the Monster Loony tradition when, in 1983, he contested Margaret Thatcher's seat of Finchley North, canvassing with a giant tin-opener in his hand ("to open the Iron Lady up") and appearing on the platform alongside her to hear the results in leopard-skin and top hat, in the inexplicable company of an Elvis lookalike. Like a dwarf in a canvas by Domenichini or a medieval court jester, he was there to remind us of the folly of grandeur, of the absurdity of those who have or who seek power, and of the uncomfortable proximity of sanity and lunacy.

To some extent, this was conscious: "The historical role which most interested me," he says in his ghost-written memoir, with its inspired title Life as Sutch, "was that of the court jester." Despite his natural handsomeness as a young man - he had something of George Best's dark-eyed beauty - he made himself grotesque in appearance, growing his hair long, dressing up in leopard-skin and/or top hat, bear-skins, cape and Viking horns. Shrieking and whooping, he declared himself separate from the human race. He had another quintessential attribute of the fool, one which Graham Sharpe carefully documents: he was deeply childish. His development was arrested, if not physically, as in the case of the classic jester, then certainly emotionally and even mentally. He seemed, as many of his colleagues and partners testify, incapable of the simplest logic and was deficient in the most ordinary skills. In fact, despite the ferocity of his appearances both as politician and as performance artist (to call him a singer is to stretch language), the characteristic that emerges most strikingly from The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch is his helplessness. Having made the supreme creative effort of inventing his persona, he clearly felt that it was the duty of everyone around him to sustain it. He had no sense of time, of obligation or of responsibility, seeming oblivious to external reality. One of the many women with whom he had affairs (often two or three simultaneously, including, improbably, a French aristocrat with whom he sometimes shared a 300-year-old house on the Seine) gave up her job to care for him, "because he seemed so neglected". Unsurprisingly, he was more or less indifferent to his own son. Like a child, he expected to be looked after; that this was a consequence of his complex relationship with his mother was lost on no one. Nancy Sutch both idolised and dominated him. When she died, he didn't wash the teacup she had used, which still bore traces of her lipstick; but equally, he omitted to report her death, and never provided a headstone for her grave.

Death constantly hovers over this compelling if sometimes slightly desultory account of his life; it came to David Sutch rather earlier than it should have done, but from the beginning it informed his performances to a remarkable degree. As an eight-year-old, he haunted Kilburn Cemetery; a coffin was the central prop of his earliest and most enduring success, Jack the Ripper. A pioneering example of horror rock from the mid-1960s, it remains, as described, a particularly ghoulish one: the number started with him being brought on, encoffined, to the strains of the "Death March", rattling chains, screams and moans, then he started poking large rubber bands out of the casket before he leapt out, white-faced, top-hatted, caped, to attack young women in the front row. There were flares, flashing lights, stage chases, broken blood capsules, clubbings and strangulations; at the climax of the act he would throw a bucket of worms over the audience. Sometimes, "to boost the bad taste factor", as he said, he would throw hearts, kidneys and lights into the auditorium. This is the act which he performed to the end, for a while in very exalted company (he may or may not have appeared on the same bill as Elvis Presley, but certainly took part in the Rock'n'Roll Revival Festival on the same bill as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis).

Over the nearly four decades in which he did it, attitudes to women changed radically, but he could never understand that there might be something offensive in re-enacting rape and murder with such gleeful relish; he blithely continued performing the number during the period of the Moors murders. In the 1980s, his audience rebelled: Peter Sutcliffe was on the loose in Yorkshire, and even the pyschobillies, as Sharpe says, were upset; but Sutch was baffled by their reaction, seeing it as good fun, an extension of the Hammer House of Horror films he so loved. Political correctness of any sort was, naturally, alien to him: in the 90s he was chasing his scantily clad WahWah girls around the stage with what he called his Minge Pole. Once, he beat up his girl-friend, but "only because she was rude about mum", he said. So that was all right, then.

Sharpe finds that as a performer, Sutch peaked at a very early stage, and was thereafter cranking up something which was increasingly mechanical; engendering the required adrenalin - which was essentially what he was purveying - exhausted him. His stunts were sometimes inspired (inviting Edward Heath when prime minister to play piano at one of Sutch's gigs, and delivering the invitation to Downing Street personally accompanied by 20 topless lovelies), but he needed a more permanent, a more recognisable niche. Publicity was mother's milk to him: as Sharpe says, only when his life was constantly reported in the media did it seem to him to have any reality. So it was a stroke of genius for him to take to the hustings, where for Screaming Lord Sutch simply to stand for election was in itself a satirical statement: he didn't really have to do anything, he simply had to be something, and at that he was very good.

"Vote for the Ghoul", an early slogan said, "he's no fool". His early Sod 'Em All party evolved into the Go to Blazes party which finally became the Official Monster Raving Loony party; his manifestos (which may or may not have been written by him) were endearingly loopy, belonging to the great British tradition of nonsense. One vintage year he promised the electorate heated toilet seats for pensioners, the abolition of January and February (to make winter shorter) and fish bred in the European Community wine lake so they could be caught ready pickled. It all seems to belong to a more innocent time: sometimes one has to rub one's eyes at the dates. Sutch's last election was as late as 1998, but his comedy manifestos seem to hark back to Beachcomber, the early Goon Shows and such forgotten entertainments as An Evening of British Rubbish. "Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" he deliciously asked at one election; during the BSE crisis, he boasted that he'd been eating British beef for years "and look at me".

But behind the charm, the nonsense, the eccentricity, much darker forces were at work. Depression had dogged him for years and the numb litany of despair echoes through the book. His mania for collecting ("anything manly", Sutch interestingly observed) caused his houses - three, at one point - to be filled to the ceiling with obscure bits and pieces to the extent that he could scarcely move. He had reached a psychic stalemate which the death of his mother confirmed. Death, madness and publicity had been the dominants of his life, and finally they came together when he killed himself in his mother's house (friends were amazed that he had known how to go about it, given his almost total practical incompetence). To Sharpe, seeing a division between David Sutch and his alter ego, it was perhaps an inspired solution to the problem of how to allow "David to return to the comfort of his mother's protection while allowing Lord Sutch to hit the headlines in a more sensational way than ever before". The book is a deeply thoughtful, rather chastened examination of someone whose very name raises a smile; quite early on the smile dies on one's lips, as it evidently did on the author's.